Special Issue on Procedural Fairness - American Judges Association

about fairness, as they did in the Heuer et al 31 studies.While this study has initiated an investigation of the motivationalunderpinnings of an authority-subordinate disparityin the role of outcomes and procedures for procedural fairnessand satisfaction, additional research on this topic is needed.Numerous other candidates exist as causal mechanisms thatmay help to account for the increased emphasis that decisionmakers place on instrumental concerns, relative to decisionrecipients. We briefly consider two potential candidates here.DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DECISION MAKERS ANDDECISION RECIPIENTSWho is Targeted by Procedures and Outcomes?While we have focused on a distinction between authoritiesand subordinates, we have so far neglected to consider the waysin which this distinction is, in most natural settings, confoundedwith several other distinctions—each of which are candidatesfor explaining the phenomenon of different degrees of concernwith outcomes versus procedures. For example, in the studiessummarized above, as in much of the procedural fairness literature,the decision maker is typically the source, rather than thetarget of the procedures under consideration. So when, in therestaurant study described above, both managers and employeesevaluated a procedure targeted at the employee—the employee,not the manager, was the one who was to be observed in therestroom. Thus, restaurant managers evaluated a procedure targetedat someone else, but employees evaluated a procedure targetedat them. It is possible that people will place a greateremphasis on respect when considering their own treatment,rather than the treatment of someone else. This possibilityrequires further investigation, so that we can establish whetherdecision makers’ reduced concern with respect may result fromthe fact that decision recipients are the targets of the treatmentor procedures being evaluated, whereas decision makers are not.The studies described above do not tease apart the potentiallyindependent contributions of the authority-subordinate distinctionfrom the source-target distinction.In addition, decision recipients are also generally morelikely than decision makers to be affected by the outcome thatresults from the procedure. In one study that examined people’sreactions to a smoking ban, smokers were more sensitivethan non-smokers to the procedures that were used to implementthat new policy. 32 The same distinction might matter asjudges interact with litigants—by virtue of the fact that most ofthe procedures employed by the court will produce outcomesof considerably greater consequence to the litigants than thejudges, the litigants might be more sensitive to procedural subtleties.For the purposes of gaining a better understanding ofthe disparate reactions to procedures and outcomes we havedescribed above, this distinction should also be investigatedindependently of the authority-subordinate distinction and thesource-target distinction.The Macroscopic PerspectiveSo far, we have emphasizedthe extent to which most ofthe procedural fairnessresearch has focused on thesubordinates in their encounterswith authorities. Recently,other researchers havepointed to another potentiallyimportant variable that hasreceived relatively little attention,and that might also playa role in producing some ofthe effects we have obtainedIt is possible thatpeople will place agreater emphasison respect whenconsidering theirown treatment,rather than thetreatment ofsomeone else.in our own studies. Most of the existing fairness research asksparticipants to evaluate procedures directed at individuals(e.g., encounters between a judge and a litigant, or between apolice officer and a civilian, or a manager and an employee).Recently, some studies have begun to investigate fairness reasoningin settings in which procedures are directed at groupsof people. Tyler and colleagues 33 point out that some procedurescan involve a macroscopic perspective, and Leung, Tong,and Lind 34 investigated whether respectful treatment, so wellestablishedas a critical fairness concern when procedures aredirected at individuals, holds for policy and social decisionsthat are primarily concerned with collective rather than withindividual outcomes. In a series of surveys that asked participantsabout large-scale social issues (asylum seekers, an economicintervention, and accountability of principal governmentofficials), Leung et al showed that, contrary to findingsusually seen with individual-level decisions in procedural fairnessstudies, collective outcome favorability was more importantthan procedural fairness in influencing participants’endorsements of policy decisions. 35In natural settings, decision makers, such as judges, administerdispute resolution procedures regularly, and may thus beexposed to the wider implications of a procedure’s outcome formany individuals, across many different scenarios, often acrosslong periods of time. It therefore appears that, in naturalisticsettings, group-level and societal-level concerns may be moresalient for decision makers, rather than decision recipients. Itis therefore plausible that decision makers and decision recipientsdiffer in their focus, with decision makers taking thismacroscopic perspective, while individual concerns are moresalient for decision recipients. As noted above, decision recipients,typically of lower or less secure status than decisionmakers, are highly motivated to seek out information abouttheir status in social groups when interacting with authorities.According to the group value 36 and relational 37 models of proceduralfairness, treatment is central to fairness reasoningbecause it conveys this important relational information. In32. Jerald Greenberg, Using Socially Fair Treatment to PromoteAcceptance of a Work Site Smoking Ban, 79 J. APPLIED SOC. PSYCHOL.288 (1994).33. TYLER ET AL., SOCIAL JUSTICE, supra note 8.34. Kwok Leung et al., Realpolitik Versus Fair Process: ModeratingEffects of Group Identification on Acceptance of Political Decisions,92 J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 476 (2007).35. Id.36. Tyler, supra note 22.37. Tyler & Lind, supra note 5.Court Review - Volume 44 69